The thing that happens

The thing that happens is that you become trapped in who you are.

Say you are blessed with a wonderful talent, like playing the violin. If you are fortunate, you will pour all your passion, all your soul, all that you are into the music that you play. Seized by the overwhelmingly powerful moments in your life, you may compose sounds that move millions of souls. You may harmonize your music to another's, to the one that becomes your one. This is life's greatest epiphany. Playing together, you become a new "one", born of such an intense energy as has never before channeled itself in music. You and your beloved literally become stars.

But then you are trapped. You will play your instrument until no one cares to listen any more. At best, you may record the sadness of producing an ever diminishing catalog of new music. And then you will simply fade from view.

This is our story: the story of us all. However great or small our moments of triumph and ecstasy, however unbounded our aspirations may once seem, we are doomed to repeat ourselves until we are no longer interesting, and to fade into oblivion singing the same song, telling the same story, painting the same painting, or playing the same role until there is no audience left, and we are alone.

That is why in order to find true happiness, we must look elsewhere than to our achievements...

G.K.T. Philalethes
30 January 2010